I guess it boils down to whether you have the soul of the poet or the engineer.
I have a couple of Normarks which I will use now and again. I appreciate they may not hold sway against some modern rods but they are still a delight to use and often you'll find other anglers will stop and chat about them.
I also have a mid 1960s MG BGT, it has a free oil leak and the performance of a milk float against modern sports models but it often turns heads where, for example, a Masda MX 5, simply will not.
The next time you're passed on the motorway by something like a Norton Commando, a Vincent Black Shadow or an MGA and you're not moved, I'd suggest opening your engineer's soul and allowing a little bit of the poet in....
No manufacturer can market a product they know will lead the way thirty years later and in a world where technology moves at the speed it does, most new products are on the way down by the time they reach market. A sad conclusion but it can, surely, only get worse.
That said, I love owning new tackle and shopping, usually via ebay, for items that I grew up with fishing wise in the 1980s and 90s. They're often available at vastly reduced rates, too.
Yes, performance wise, they're often a little behind today's standards but if you put them in the hands of the guys on here, Binks, SKippy, Jerry, etc they'll still catch quality fish.
If you do get to own a Normark, don't impose your modern standards and beliefs on it. Just enjoy it for what it was and is.
Someone, I think it may have been Dryden, said "the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there". That's probably good advice for your Normarks because "differently" and "wrongly" are two very different (!) things...